COMPARISON OF NONLOCAL APPROACHES IN CONTINUUM DAMAGE MECHANICS

A local continuum damage theory and two distinct nonlocal variants are applied to model the failure behaviour of a construction made of macroscopically brittle material. In the nonlocal formulations a material characteristic length parameter is introduced associated with the width of the microstructural damage zone. The numerical implementation of the approaches has been performed in a finite element code. Simulation results calculated for a plane stress configuration are compared. The local approach solutions show severe lack of mesh objectivity, whereas both the nonlocal solutions converged after mesh refinement. By adequate tuning of the nonlocal descriptions mutually similar responses can be obtained, although intrinsic differences are present in the resulting damage distributions.